Watching Our Waters
A Report on Water Resource Monitoring
in the Saco Headwaters Watershed
Prepared by the Saco Headwaters Alliance and FB Environmental Associates
Planning for the future
Investments in monitoring now will inform effective actions that will in turn prevent harm to our water resources that would be much more costly to restore, or worse, irreversible.
The Saco Headwaters Watershed—lands and waterbodies that drain into the Saco River and its major tributary the Ossipee River—covers 1,294 square miles in eastern New Hampshire (Carroll, Coos, and Grafton counties) and western Maine (Cumberland, Oxford, and York counties). It encompasses 19 communities (13 in New Hampshire, 6 in Maine), an additional 31 communities partially within the watershed (19 in New Hampshire, 12 in Maine) and is home to 76,051 residents. The watershed includes over 1,591 miles of rivers and streams, 140 named lakes and ponds, 1,648 unnamed lakes and ponds, an unknown number of intermittent headwater streams, springs, and seeps, and two important stratified drift aquifers —the Ossipee and Upper Saco aquifers—that provide drinking water for many municipalities, homes, and businesses in the region and receive their recharge waters from precipitation, infiltration, and stream seepage.
Robust Water Quality Monitoring.
This report combines a number of components – each of which would be an important undertaking on its own – in pursuit of one goal: to strengthen water resource monitoring in the Saco Headwaters watershed so that key data gaps can be closed and water protection efforts can be based on the best science possible. A core assumption underlying all of this work is that investments in monitoring now will inform effective actions that will in turn prevent harm to our water resources that would be much more costly to restore, or worse, irreversible.
The action plan addresses known threats and steps to respond effectively, and it also strengthens a monitoring program that can detect new threats as they arise. Resilience demands attention to known unknowns and to unknown unknowns. The purpose of this work is to build a toolbox of watershed-wide diagnostic tools to guide threat prevention and rapid remediation across the watershed ecosystem that is scientific and data-based, and that employs continuously improving 21st century technology.